NBA is said to be checking out a famous London spot for a new European show.
The NBA is moving forward with exciting plans for a new 16-team European basketball league and is thinking about using a famous London landmark for the city’s new team. NBA Europe is set to start in the fall of 2027, and it will be a joint project between the NBA and FIBA, the global basketball organization.
The league will have 12 permanent teams, with four more joining each year through qualification. There’s a lot of money involved in the bids for the franchises, with announcements expected in the coming months.
Twelve cities have been specially targeted: Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Istanbul, London, Lyon, Madrid, Manchester, Milan, Munich, Paris, and Rome. These cities, along with some others not on the NBA’s preferred list, have all put in bids. Some of these bids are believed to be worth over $1 billion!
In London, the group bidding includes former Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, American billionaire Nikesh Arora, and Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly.
Manchester’s bids reportedly involve the owners of Manchester United and Manchester City, along with a private equity-backed bid from Manchester Basketball.
While the potential owners wait to hear if they won a spot, there’s also the question of where the London team would play. One option being looked at is part of the land around the famous Battersea Power Station in South London. Chelsea previously considered this site for a new stadium inside the old power station.
“The discussions about Battersea Power Station show it’s one of several places being thought of for an arena,” says The Athletic. The land under review is part of the bigger Battersea Power Station redevelopment, not the historic Grade II-listed building itself. This well-known landmark, which stopped producing power in 1983, reopened to the public in 2022 after an eight-year restoration. Now, it’s filled with shops, restaurants, offices, and apartments and is at the heart of a 42-acre riverside development.
The rest of the development land (16 acres) has permission to build up to 3.2 million square feet of homes, shops, cultural spots, and fun places, but no official plan has been put forward for a basketball arena yet.
This new NBA Europe league has some roots in NFL Europe—once called the World League—which brought American football to cities like London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Frankfurt. The London Monarchs (later England Monarchs) played from 1991 to 1998, outlasted only by the Scottish Claymores. NFL Europe closed in 2007, and that same year the NFL started its International Series games, with the New York Giants and Miami Dolphins playing the first match abroad in October.